Chaos
by Koolkat007
Summary: Even by the X-men's standards, Pretz was an odd one...
1. Collision

Collision  
  
Pretz closed the book she was reading and sighed. She ran her fingers through her spiky black hair. How could Kris read things like this in one day? She'd ask her, but Kris wasn't exactly speaking to her, which wasn't surprising. Besides, Kris was a total nerd, and Pretz was only in on-level courses so she probably read faster.  
  
"I told her not to touch me." Pretz said out loud. In her agitation she whipped her furry tail out from its normal place of concealment wrapped around her waist. The day before Kris had been threatening to poke her, and she had told her that it wouldn't be a very good idea, but Kris didn't listen. She was knocked unconscious the instant her hand brushed against Pretz's bare arm. She'd woken up an hour later, and freaked out when Pretz came near her.  
  
Pretz stared at her hands for a second. What was she? She'd known since she was very young that she wasn't entirely human, everything indicated it. Her disproportionate strength, the teleporting, her tail, those she'd known about and knew how to control. This was different. She distractedly traced the scar on her forehead that had caused her to end up with the nickname Harriet because of its lightning bolt shape. That too, was nothing new. It'd been there as long as she could remember. This thing, with touching people and them falling unconscious, had started about a week ago at her friend Lance's house. His little brother Todd, nicknamed Toad after the X- Men: Evolution character, was being his typical annoying self, this time he'd stolen her notebook. Pretz punched him, being careful not to use enough force to break anything, and he went flying across the room. However, instead of getting up and running away like usual, he just lay there, and weird thoughts were floating around Pretz's head that she knew were not her own. "What the Hell?" Lanced asked. "He's out cold. You didn't hit him hard enough to do that!"  
  
"I know. I was careful not to. You know Rouge? What she does? I think this might be the same sorta thing." She replied.  
  
Since then, she'd tried to avoid touching people, and she had managed well enough. Until yesterday when Kris wouldn't leave her alone. She couldn't focus on Jurassic Park, despite its focus on dinosaurs, one of her favorite things. "Mom, I'm going to Lance's!" she yelled down the stairs. The mom she spoke to was her adoptive mother, who'd adopted her when she was one.  
  
"Fine, just be back for dinner!" Her mom yelled back.  
  
Pretz teleported to the garage and grabbed her skateboard, then teleported into Lance's bedroom, five miles away. It occasionally scared the heck out of him, but it was the only place where she was positive no one else would notice. Lance was fifteen years old and a sophomore at her school's rival school. He was sitting at his desk doing his homework when there was a familiar "bamf" behind him. He turned, looking from her skateboard to her outfit and said, "I hope you've got a belt for those pants by now." Pretz was wearing a pair of baggy black pants with a red stripe down each leg. The cuff had gotten stuck on her skateboard's wheel last time she'd worn them, causing her to fall flat on her face.  
  
Pretz rolled her eyes. "Will you shut up about that? As a matter of fact, I bought one at Hot Topic last night. Let's go attack that monster hill of yours, we'll talk later." Lance's neighborhood featured one huge, steep hill that it was suicide to try to skate all the way to the bottom of, but there was grass on either side of the road, so it wasn't a big deal to jump off. She and Lance ran downstairs and Pretz waited impatiently as Lance got his bike.  
  
A few minutes later, they were racing down the hill and Lance was screaming at the top of his lungs, as usual. Out here, focusing on when she had to jump off to keep from hitting the SUV at the bottom of the hill, wind streaming past her face, Pretz could forget the entire incident with Kris and the one with Toad, even. She almost understood why Lance did this every day. Suddenly, a white-haired boy ran into her path. There was no way she could stop in time. Desperately trying to stop, she was rushing toward the boy, who wasn't paying any attention to her. "Slam!" Skateboarder and pedestrian met.  
  
"Damn it! Why didn't he get out of the way?" She muttered, pulling herself up. The white-haired boy didn't move. His skin was a dark tan, a striking contrast with his hair. He appeared to be unconscious. Pretz groaned. With any luck, he'd think the collision had knocked him out, though the thoughts whirling around in her head declared otherwise. From those thoughts she caught a name. Pietro. She groaned again. 


	2. Chaos Emerging

2. Chaos Emerging  
  
Lance ran over to Pretz and then stopped when he got a good look at the boy's face. "Is that who I think it." He started.  
  
"Yeah." Pretz said, "it's Pietro, A.k.A Quicksilver."  
  
"Well we'd better get him out of the middle of the street. Why don't you carry him back to my house?" Lance said.  
  
"Why don't you?" Pretz snarled, then caught herself. "Sorry. I think this new ability is a lot like Rouge's. You're right, I have to carry him 'cause you couldn't manage it."  
  
About an hour later, Pietro woke up to see the faces of the girl who'd run into him and a boy that looked like Avalanche staring down at him. "Lance, I think he's waking up." The girl said. That shocked him right awake.  
  
"Your name's Lance?" he asked.  
  
The boy that looked like Avalanche nodded. "Yeah, so? I have a friend named Scott Sumners." he said. "Do I look like Avalanche to you?"  
  
Pietro winced. "Yeah, kind of."  
  
The girl laughed. "Of course you do, Lance. You haven't got around to cutting you hair yet. By the way, Pietro, I'm Pretz."  
  
"Weird name." he replied.  
  
She shrugged. "And Pietro isn't? Compared to my brothers' names Pretz is pretty normal. Why didn't you get out of the way? She asked.  
  
"Why didn't you stop?" he retorted.  
  
"I couldn't. It's impossible with that hill. I was going too fast."  
  
Lance interceded. "Maybe you should head out, Pietro. I don't know how my mom would react if she found you here, I'm gonna get into trouble about Pretz anyway."  
  
Pietro pulled himself up from the couch. "Yeah, I'd better leave before my crazy sister figures out where I am and kills me." He was off the couch and out the door before either of them could blink.  
  
"Show off." Pretz muttered. Seconds later the doorbell rang. Lance let in Andrew and Scott Sumners. "Hey guys," Pretz said, "You just missed Quicksilver." She expected some reaction but was disappointed.  
  
"Well, you just missed Shadow Cat. Least I'm pretty sure that it was her. On our way here, Scott insisted on filming a group of girls walking around, and this brunette they called Kitty walked right through a stop sign. Scott got it on tape." Andrew said. He was Lance's age and Scott was a year younger. Scott transferred the tape from his camcorder and put it in Lance's VCR. He fast forwarded through a couple hours of Andrew doing tricks on the half-pipe in their back yard until he got to today's footage. The girl was walking backwards talking to a red head and a girl with reddish brown hair with a white streak in it. He fast forwarded a little and paused it. There she was, standing halfway through the stop sign.  
  
About a mile away Kitty Pride had been walking to the mall with her friends Rouge and Jubilee when she accidentally phased through a stop sign. "You'd better hope no one saw that." Rouge said. "Who would have? Nobody's nearby except for those two boys with the- Oh man, I'm screwed. I've got to get that tape!" Kitty exclaimed. She ran after the blonde-haired boy with the video camera.  
  
After she'd followed him for about a mile, he knocked on the door of a house and ducked inside, closely followed by the taller boy with the skateboard. She bit her lip and thought about how to approach the house.  
  
"Something moved out there." Todd said abruptly, breaking the silence that had enveloped the group with the end of the footage. He pointed out the window toward a tree in his front yard. Lance followed his brother's gaze without seeing anything, but that didn't mean there wasn't anything there. Despite as obnoxious as he could be, Todd seemed to have a certain instinct for some things. Lance trusted him in this, if nothing else. "Where? I don't see anything." He said.  
  
"Behind the tree. If you look really close you can see something pink." Todd replied.  
  
Kitty flinched. That kid was looking straight at her! Who was he? He wasn't one of the ones she'd been following. The long-haired boy was looking too! That wasn't Avalanche, was it? She heard a 'bamf' behind her and turned, expecting to see Kurt. Instead there was a girl in baggy pants and a black T-shirt.  
  
"Hey, Kitty. You came looking for the tape, right?" the girl asked. Kitty just gaped at her. The girl held out a gloved hand and despite the summer heat, was wearing red and black striped arm warmers. "I'm Pretz."  
  
"I'm Kitty Pride. Not that you didn't already know that." Kitty replied. "Are you a mutant?"  
  
The girl shrugged. "I guess you could call me that." Pretz answered, allowing her tail to uncoil from around her waist. "I recognized you from the tape. Your friend called you Kitty, and I figured you were here for one of two reasons."  
  
"The tape, and what's the other reason I'd be here?" Kitty asked.  
  
"I thought you might be following the white-haired idiot I ran into on my skateboard. I think he said his name was Pietro. " Pretz replied.  
  
"He was here too? Sheesh. That's not Avalanche in there, is it?" Kitty asked, motioning towards the open window.  
  
"Who? Oh, you mean Lance. Nah, the only way he could make the earth move was with a bulldozer. The name's just a coincidence, and he let his hair grow out for Halloween and never cut it. Quicksilver made the same mistake. Oh well. Come on in."  
  
Kitty entered the house cautiously, as if expecting something else to pop out of no where. She encountered no more surprises, just the four boys she'd already seen sitting on the couch watching her walk through a stop sign. Kitty looked pained. "May I please have that tape?" she asked.  
  
"Sure," Scott replied, "as soon as I get most of it copied over, I'll give it to you with just the last little part on it." He started rewinding the tape to copy it over to the computer, when suddenly Kitty said,  
  
"Wait, stop, go back. Was that a 720?" She asked. Scott replayed the indicated section of tape. They watched Andrew go up the half-pipe into the air and make two complete rotations before touching down again. He landed it perfectly. Kitty whistled. "I'm not too into that kind of thing, but Bobby and Kurt dragged me and Rouge to an X-games exhibition that was in town, and one of the guys fell trying to do that. Are you a pro or something?"  
  
"Nah. I'm not that good. Maybe if I live to be a couple thousand I'll be that good, but not now." Andrew replied.  
  
"Cut the modesty crap, Andrew, if you wanted to you could enter the X-games now and get at least third if you didn't win." Pretz retorted. "Say," she started, as though something had just occurred to her, "what are you guys doing in Georgia, anyway?"  
  
"We're looking for someone. You know those keyless entry pads that some people have on their garage doors? Well Magneto has something similar on his hideout, but the password's like twenty digits long. Wolverine was doing a little reconnaissance when a girl set off the alarm and ran like Hell. The thing is though, she tripped one of the alarms after the keyless entry pad. Meaning that she knows the code to it, which we could really kinda use. So we're trying to find her. She's supposed to be in this general area someplace. My turn. What's with the gloves and arm warmers? It's June!" 


End file.
